The official blog of the Herman Brothers! Get a behind the scenes look into their
Outdoor Adventures- fishing, hunting, camping, making tv shows and raising their families. The blog is family friendly with a handful of funny videos, stories, pictures, tips and inspirational messages mixed together.

Sunday, May 2, 2010

Receding Hair line took a hit this week

It seems like for every hair I lose off the top of my head, 3 more sprout somewhere else. I figure at this rate of bodily hair redistribution that in about 15 months or so I will be using soap on my head and shampoo on the rest of my body..... Well, I probably just disturbed, scarred or scared off a few people from the remainder of this post, but I am sure I made a few others chuckle a bit (especially those who can relate) with such an introduction. At least I didnt post the pictures!

Anyhow my hairline did indeed take a big hit this week. I just hope that stress induced rapid hair loss on the top of my head doesn't accelerate the redistributed hair growth at the same conversion rate or I would be mistaken for bigfoot next time I head outdoors. What I am getting at is that this has pretty much been the most stressful week of my life. I tried to sugar coat it a bit with an attempt at humor, but that didnt even help as much as I had hoped.

So, what happened to make a week so bad? I think I just might have to take you back a few days into the last week and start from the beginning. While in Branson last week my computer froze up and decided to quit working altogether. On this computer I have absolutely everything for my business. My calendar, contacts, accounting, clients, lake reports, documents, charts, schedules, management plans, pictures, etc, etc, etc.

Already being in Branson during the busiest time of year was not going to be easy, but getting back from Branson without my computer working was an absolute nightmare! I had meetings, appointments, and jobs scheduled for that week, but had no way of knowing who they were with or what time they were scheduled for. Not only did I lose my calendar for last week, but I lost my calendar and schedule for the entire summer. I spent all winter long filling it up and lost it all.

A couple meetings with my computer doctor throughout the week and we were able to salvage pretty much all of everything except for some odd reason my calendar on Outlook. What happened was my hard drive actually crashed and it had something to do with my outlook mail box being just a bit cluttered and my computer not being maintained or kept up properly. When I would delete emails I just sent them to the trash, but never thought of emptying the trash. My computer guy was pretty shocked to see an extra 33,000 emails hanging around that didnt need to be there. Many of them were large files of pictures from folks' ponds, weeds, fish, etc. Anyhow there were no viruses on the laptop, just too much info stored in the wrong places which caused some hard drive issues.

So I missed a couple appointments last week, but was able to fill everything back up again for the summer, except for 3 or 4 consultations that for the life of me I cant remember who they were with. I know the name of one gentleman I am supposed to electrofish for on May 21 up in Northern Illinois: Ron Taylor, but cant find his telephone number or city. The others I am missing are just gone until the people call me up wondering where I was. (unless they get ahold of me beforehand and we can reschedule). I know there technically isn't even hundreds of hours in a week, but I literally spent hundreds of hours trying to piece everything back together this week. Words can't even describe what I went through. My everything was stored in that little black technological contraption.

I was able to pull some important stuff from my hard drive and onto my office PC for the time being, but I am still without most of my stuff. Hopefully by Wednesday of this coming week everything will be back to business as usual.

I was not an easy person to talk to or be around with so much information floating in my head and scrambling to get everything down onto paper and fixed. I know exactly how an overworked computer feels with too much information floating around in the wrong files. I just about had some internal hard drive issues as well. I never got too worked up or mad or anything, I just had too much information going on inside and not enough sleep to function properly. Longterm ramifications from a week like this will definitely be a couple inches on an already receding hairline. I have a peninsula of nice hair dead center on the top which in the morning when I wake up has a good chance of becoming an island.

After church today I sat on the couch holding Drake for a minute while Brook got the kids down for naps and I woke up 2 hours later (apparently Brook came and got Drake). That was the best 2 hours of sleep from the week and greatly needed. Spent the rest of the afternoon just playing with kids and we walked up to Mcdonalds for some ice cream treats before bedtime and before the cold front moved through.

The next 8 weeks are extremely crazy awesome (busy). We will be traveling around the midwest electrofishing, consulting on some really neat projects, putting fish into about 30 ponds and lakes and installing quite a few aeration systems. Every single day is booked up solid, so hopefully we have all the glitches and kinks worked out now.

Allen comes back to work full time on Wednesday, just in time to go to Davenport, Iowa for Electrofishing and Aeration installing with Justin. Our office manager Holly starts up in two weeks just in time to step into a battlefield: May the Lord have mercy upon her soul as she untangles the mess Justin and I have created over the last 6 months since Marcy moved on to greener pastures with Cliffton and Gunderson.

Drake is growing like a weed. Mae and Noah are actually short and skinny for their ages, but Drake is legitimately my child: he's just big! He knows how to eat real good and he has abnormally large feet, hands, arms, legs, stomach, rolls, etc, etc. He still has all kinds of doctor appointments and check ups every week, but he is doing real good at all of them so far. The next big one is May 20th at Easter Seals for his developmental evaluation. Then a week later we meet with the Ear Nose Throat specialist to come up with a gameplan for his ears.

Its 10:39 pm and I am actually headed to bed for the first time this week on this side of midnight. Next week is going to be alot of fun. We start out Monday installing some fish feeders in Lewiston and then head to Astoria in the afternoon electrofishing on a 10 acre lake. Then we have 2 big fish trucks coming in. One from Arkansas on Wednesday evening with some really big feed trained largemouth bass, 1000's of Hybrid Striped Bass, 4000 big hybrid bluegill, a couple thousand 10 inch catfish, and several thousand redear sunfish. Then on Thursday we have a big truck coming in from Northern Illinois with a whole bunch of smallmouth bass, tons of big yellow perch, small pumkinseed sunfish, and 100's of pounds of fathead minnows. It will take several days to deliver all those fish. Stocking ponds and lakes is always alot of fun but can get a bit stressful trying to coordinate deliveries and keep fish alive.....It will be a few days before I will get to post some pictures next, but I will be taking quite a few pics.